Posts Tagged ‘Tea Party’

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is joining a Wall Street investment bank as vice-chairman and managing director.

Cantor, 51, who served as the Republican congressman for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, also will be elected to the board of directors of the global investment bank, Moelis & Company, the bank announced Tuesday.

He will be based in the bank’s New York office and is scheduled to open an office in Washington.

“Eric has proven himself to be a pro-business advocate and one who will enhance our boardroom discussions with CEOs and senior management as we help them navigate their most important strategic decisions,” Ken Moelis, chairman and CEO of Moelis & Company, said in a statement.

After a career in the Virginia legislature, Cantor was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000 and was made chief deputy whip just two years later, before his 40th birthday.

Cantor, who was the sole Jewish Republican in Congress, was as majority leader the most senior Jewish lawmaker in U.S. history and had ambitions of becoming speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Little-known college professor, David Brat Cantor, who had the national backing of the insurgent Tea Party movement, defeated Cantor in the primary in June. Brat accused Cantor of betraying conservative principles on spending, debt and immigration.

Cantor stepped down from his position as House majority leader and from his congressional seat on Aug. 18.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul intends to introduce legislation next week that would prohibit aid to the Palestinian Authority if it does not explicitly recognize Israel and renounce violence.

The Kentucky senator, who is a strong proponent of cutting foreign aid, including that to Israel, was quoted by The Washington Post as saying, “Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with an entity that does not believe it should exist, and has used terrorist tactics to seek its end.”

Referring to last week’s announcement by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas that his Fatah faction is reuniting with the rival Hamas terrorist organization, Rand added, “Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with an entity that does not believe it should exist, and has used terrorist tactics to seek its end.”

His bill would give the Palestinian Authority five weeks after formal re-unification to renounce violence and recognize Israel, two conditions that are counter to Hamas’ charter. Abbas has said he does not have to recognize Israel because his predecessor Yasser Arafat supposedly did so. Arafat actually simply acknowledged that the entity of Israel exists.

Abbas, with his miraculous two-tongued mouth, has said he is against violence but backs the right of “resistance,” which is the English translation of the Arab code word for violence.

Abbas also has increasingly praised Palestinian Authority suicide bombers and other terrorists, known to him and his cohorts as “martyrs.”

And why should he go through the motions of recognizing Israel when it is clearly stated on official Palestinian Authority maps that all of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, exists – as Palestine?

But for all of Sen. Rand’s grand plans, his bill might carry as much weight as a Palestinian Authority agreement since it would take effect only after a Fatah-Hamas unity government is formed, and that will take place anytime between six months and never.

It doesn’t matter because Paul’s real intention is to win support from the Jewish voters, especially those with money.

His anti-foreign aid policy has won praise from Americans fed up with Uncle Sam for going deeper into debt while spending their tax dollars for little things like the failed war in Iraq, the failed war on Taliban and the general failure of trying to buy Muslim love with money, which has brought nothing but trouble to the Middle East.

In a visit to Israel last year, he said the time has come to stop chasing bad investments with bad investments, even if it means cutting aid to Israel.

“It will harder to be a friend of Israel if we are out of money. It will be harder to defend Israel if we destroy our country in the process,” he said in Jerusalem. “I think there will be significant repercussions to running massive deficits … you destroy your currency by spending money you don’t have.”

He added, “I’m concerned that some of the weaponry that we are currently giving to Egypt may one day be used against Israel.”

Isn’t it weird that President Barack Obama never thought of that?

Paul’s theory is that cutting military aid to Israel actual is good for Israel since it will make Israel more self-dependent, especially when it comes to responding to attacks.

“I don’t think you need to call me on the phone to ask permission for what you want to do to stop missiles from raining down on you from Gaza,” he said.

Paul also made it clear that that the first targets of foreign aid cuts would be Pakistan, Egypt and other peace-hating countries where Obama his “reached out” to engage them, although it is not clear in what he actually is engaging them except in Russian Roulette with a weighted ball.

E.W. Jackson, the Republican Tea Party candidate for Lt. Governor of Virginia, has labeled all non-Christians as having a “false religion” but when confronted by Jews, he said they are an exception to the rule.

“I’m a Christian. I’m a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ,” he said. “Of course, like every Christian, I believe that he’s the only way. But we understand that Christianity came out of Judaism. We have deep and profound respect for Judaism. We do not view Judaism as a false religion. I can’t say that about everything. But that is true of Judaism.”

Amen, brother. Hallelujah!

But his generous acceptance that Judaism is not a false religion did not satisfy the crowd at the Simon Family Jewish Community Center.

The Muslims didn’t get off the hook as well as the Jews, and Jackson didn’t directly answer the question. Instead, he asserted, “Look, I’m running for lieutenant governor. I’m not running to be theologian of Virginia. I am a preacher. That means I’ve got to serve people who are atheists and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus and Mormons and of every background. So I don’t want to try to get into a theological analysis of what I think of various religions.”

So much for the Buddhist and Muslim vote.

If Jackson does not want to discuss his views on other religions, one would think the ordained minister would button his lip a bit more.

So far in the campaign, Jackson has denounced Planned Parenthood for killing more blacks than the Ku Klux Klan.

So it looks like he has lost the KKK vote, too.

His previous comments from the pulpit and elsewhere are likely to cost him a lot more votes. He has said that parents’ sins cause birth defects and that yoga leads to Satanism.

But, no, no, that is not what he believes come campaign time.

“I do not believe that birth defects are caused by parents’ sin unless, of course, there’s a direct scientific connection between the parents’ behavior and the disabilities of the child, such as a child who might develop birth defects if his or her mother was addicted to heroin,” he has said in self-defense during the current campaign.

“I do not believe that yoga leads to Satanism. One of my ministers is a yoga instructor. What I said was that Christian meditation does not involve emptying oneself but filling oneself … with the spirit of God. That is classic Biblical Christianity,” he explained.

So maybe he will win back the yoga vote.

Homosexuals are not exactly crazy about Jackson, who has declared that “homosexuality poisons culture,” but he argues his comment was taken out of context.

“What I really said was that the gay rights movement, so called, the homosexual activists, engage in some behavior that is absolutely horrendous, and that’s true, everybody knows that; from going into Catholic churches and desecrating the Sacraments to engaging in all kinds of demonstrative behavior to try to call attention to what they view as their plight,” he said.

Homosexuals need not worry because Jackson added, “I respect every human being, I don’t believe that there’s any second-class citizens in Virginia, I don’t treat anybody any differently because of their sexual orientation.”

Jackson wants voters to think that he can separate his views as a preacher from his functioning as Lieutenant Governor.

“I’m not going to spend the campaign talking about these issues, so let’s get it out of the way now,” he told a gathering in the Virginia suburb of Manassas, outside of Washington, D.C.

Time will tell if telling the Jews they aren’t so bad after all will win him the Jewish vote.

For the time being, the polls show that the voters are not thrilled with either Jackson or the Democratic party candidate, State Sen. Ralph Northam.

A new poll published on Wednesday shows that with election day two weeks away, 12 percent have a favorable view of Jackson, compared with 9 percent for Northam. However, a hefty 20 percent of the respondents have an unfavorable view of Jackson, compared with 5 percent who do not like Northam.

The most memorable early executive act on the part of the newly elected President Barack Obama, for whom I voted in 2008, was to embrace his predecessor’s economic stimulus package, push it up to $800 billion and give it to all the many speculators and fat cats who had caused the collapse in the first place.

As far as I was concerned, this was an act of class betrayal of an enormous magnitude. The White House and the loyal media bombarded us with the notion that if we dared permit sick, corrupt financial institutions to meet their natural demise it would mean the end of civilization. They were—so we were told—just too big to fail. Millions of Americans could go underwater with their properties – that we weren’t afraid of, but if AG stock holders were left at the end of the day with what amounted to so much useless paper – that would have been catastrophic.

What Obama should have done back then, which would have surely brought us over the hump in a couple of years—instead of schlepping a delusional recovery for the better part of a decade—was to hand out trillions of dollars to local municipalities, so they would in turn give them to their citizens for make-work. Dig ditches, mow lawns, fix bridges, write poetry, I don’t care. It wasn’t about the end product – it was about getting money into people’s hands so the economy would be resurrected not on Wall Street, but in the thousands of towns and hamlets across America. Because when you give a poor man a paycheck, he goes right away and pays for food, clothing, rent. It’s the best distribution system known to man. If it took ten trillion dollars – what the heck, print ten trillion dollars and send them out to fix the country.

You would be worried about inflation, you’re saying? Well, since the dollar has been taken off the gold standard in 1971, inflation is caused by one, singular factor: what it costs banks to buy money from the Fed, the U.S. central bank. If they pay half a percent or so in interest—as they’ve been doing for decades now—then there’s no inflation. The only other possibility for an inflation is if there’s a shortage of goods, and then too many dollars are chasing too few goods and the prices soar. Look around you – we’re in a merchandizing glut, despite all the economic catastrophes and the poverty line and the single mothers – there are still way too many iPhones out there for each American.

But you don’t have to agree with me on any of the above to understand the following: If, back then, in early 2009, when President Obama was pushing his stimulus package in all the wrong directions, a group of 80 Democrats had stood up on their hind legs and said, Hell, No, We Won’t Go, I and all my Democratic friends would have rushed to the streets to cheer them on.

That’s the part I find hard to accept – why is it that when 80 right-wing parliamentarians are standing on their hind legs and telling their leadership and their president to go to hell, they won’t sign on to what they consider to be a wrong budget policy – why are they being attacked as messianic crazies, just this side of the loony bin?

Former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration Robert Reich, whom I happen to like very much, had this to say to Spiegel about the Tea Party Congress members: “Some of them really have contempt for the entire process of government. They’re followers of people who say that we ought to shrink government down to the size that it can drown in a bathtub. They hate government viscerally. They’re not in Washington to govern; they’re in Washington to tear it down.”

I’m not telling you anything you haven’t seen and read over the past month or so, and as the looming date of the “default” grows nearer, those character assassinations will only get nastier. And the polls are showing that America is buying it, and seems to be blaming the Republican party for our economic mess. And since our politicians live and die by the polls, it’s quite possible they’ll find a way out of this crisis, maybe for 6 weeks, maybe for 2 months, who knows.

A group of powerful Republican activists and donors with experience in campaigns across the country are ready to aid fellow Republican Joe Lhota’s underdog candidacy against Bill de Blasio, if the NYS law of a $150K contribution limit is lifted.

According to the Huffington Post, New York Progress and Protection PAC say multiple would-be donors are lined up to contribute more than $150,000 each. “It’s about free speech. Free speech is the reason why I’m doing lots of things,” Shaun McCutcheon, one of those would-be donors, told HP. “It’s about our rights as people under the First Amendment.”

McCutcheon says he thinks the former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could pull out a surprise victory with the help of outside money. “If you get a little competition, we can win some races nobody thinks we can win,” he said.

The NYPP’s contention that New York state’s campaign contribution ceiling violates First Amendment protections will be heard in federal court on Oct. 8. Handling the legal strategy is Michael Carvin, a Washington-based attorney specializing in campaign law who represented George W. Bush during the 2000 recount. Last year, he appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court to unsuccessfully challenge the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

“This is plainly unconstitutional,” Carvin reiterated.

De Blasio’s spokesman Dan Levitan criticized the PAC’s attempts to sway the election and upend the state’s campaign finance regulations in an email to HuffPost.

Speaking to reporters after a hour-long visit Tuesday at Yeshiva University in Midtown, Mr. Lhota suggested the attempt by the de Blasio campaign to paint him as a Tea-Party extremist is just not going to work. “Anyone that wants to tag me with what’s going on in Washington, is making a big mistake,” he said. “I’ve not agreed with anything the Tea Party has done – where they’re going and what the want to do – and on top of all, I’ll stand with Pete King on his position.”

And as if to prove his point, Lhota didn’t mince words in describing right-wing Republican lawmakers in Washington as “extremists who’re holding the government and the people hostage to the positions they hold.”

Mr. Lhota also said he supports “major parts” of Obamacare but that there isn’t one perfect way to deal with healthcare and it isn’t an issue in NYC. “The hangup on Obamacare, in this particular case, is wrong. Using it as leverage is wrong. And shutting down the government is wrong,” Mr. Lhota stated.

He added that he had some issues with the individual mandate but would not further discuss it before he had made up his mind on it.

Mr. de Blasio’s campaign launched a tumblr Tuesday morning, painting Lhota as an extremist and saying Lhota extolled the virtues of the right-wing ideology, telling the SI Tea Party group in May, “My philosophical issues are very close to yours in many, many ways.”

But Mr. Lhota rebuffed that claim saying, “We had a huge ‘verbally violent’ discussion about gun control and what it means in New York City. You can take selected information about a meeting that took an hour and take one sentence and pull it out. It is not fair. I can’t tell you how much I disagree, and have consistently disagreed, with the Tea Party. And I thin they are a bad force for the Republican Party. They’re extremists and are moving the party in a direction that I think is wrong.”

“If Bill wants to run this race with character assassination, it makes me even more confident that I’m going to win,” he added.

The NY Times forgot to write some things he disagreed with Barry Goldwater, such as his position on the equal rights act and race issues, Mr. Lhota further claimed.

“If Bill wants to pave me in that position and not talk about the issues that are important to the people of New York, he’s making a very big mistake. He goes into one debate and he wants to tie me with that, I will go toe to toe with him. I’ll beat him on the issues,” he said.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell is staring at me with the uncontrolled intensity usually reserved for serial killers and time-share salesmen. “We know how to get the country back to work. The government needs to lead the way.”

He folds a napkin in what looks like some expensive oyster bar, but is probably just a television studio backdrop. “The government has to get us back to work.”

O’Donnell already has a job. His job is to yell angry things on MSNBC. Most of his listeners also have jobs or at least they have parents.

MSNBC is not a news network for the unemployed. It is a news network for aging liberals still addicted to listening to angry liberals yell about George W Bush.

On the television, O’Donnell, doing his best imitation of a strangler, wrings his hands and leans into the camera. Lean Forward, the ad, sandwiched between a drug ad that features smiling families at a picnic while the announcer soothingly tells you all the ways it can kill you and that multiracial Cheerios ad that General Mills hopes to use convince a new generation of consumers that racial progress is more important than good taste, tells me.

The ads are more soothing than the angry MSNBC segments that they bookend. And soothing is code for upscale. Even Lawrence O’Donnell angrily leaning forward in his imaginary upscale oyster bar where there are no other people smells of that same soothing patina of a moneyed world where nothing can go wrong except minor servant problems.

Strip down MSNBC to its skivvies and you find an angry NPR. It’s as if all the NPR people have given up speaking in their supercilious voices and after a few drinks at a cocktail party began holding forth on everything wrong with the canapés.

MSNBC is chock full of anger, but like Lawrence O’Donnell choking down his fury in an imaginary oyster bar over the inability of some people to understand that the government has to get us back to work in the fifth year of a liberal administration that promised to do just that, it’s an anger that makes no sense.

Liberals like to mock conservatives as a bunch of angry white men, but there are more angry white men yelling at the camera in two hours of MSNBC than in two days of FOX News.

It’s not the kind of yelling that unemployed men do when they get a call from the bank telling them that there will be no loan modification. It’s the prissy raised voices you hear at Starbucks when the Chris Hayes lookalike is shocked to be told that the java isn’t locally sourced and that if he doesn’t like that he can take his MacBook Air and finish his Great Unamerican Novel in some other coffee shop with free Wi-Fi.

MSNBCers don’t quite yell. Instead they tighten up, grind their teeth and treat viewers like the waiters in their oyster bar who got their order wrong. They aren’t going to yell, but they make it clear that they are furious and the only thing keeping them from turning red and breaking down in a screaming fit over nothing is that they suspect deep inside that the only response to their innermost volcanic venting will be a shrug. What angry leftists who grew up convinced of their snowflake specialness fear is that their anger will not change the world. That like a squalling infant in his third rate news network crib, no one will even care.

That is liberal anger, the privileged wheeze of entitled brats who do for politics exactly what their younger counterparts do for music with Pitchfork Magazine. It’s not righteous anger, but snob rage, the frustrated fury of the aesthetes of the Hill who hate what is on your iPod, your Kindle and your news feed.

“Republicans,” they spit with the venom of a Mohammedan rug merchant matching wits and saliva with his camel on a hot desert day.

“Tea Party. Ted Cruz. John Boehner.” These are the dread curses of the MSNBC set and are spoken like obscenities over an overturned car, like a starving urchin cursing the thief who stole his last loaf of bread, like a man sitting in an empty oyster bar speaking the name of the waiter who took his order an hour ago and then never came back.

These are the tales of the tribe that leans forward cupping hands around the smartphones that tell them who their enemies are and how they wronged them in the days of Nixon, the great betrayal of Bush v. Gore and the latest horrible plot just uncovered by the intrepid fabricators at Media Matters.

The tribe has few identities. It isn’t big on religions and nations. The borders of the United States are an outdated detail to them and the only ancestry that interests them is the stark divide between white and official minority. What they have are tastes. Their tastes in music, movies, food and politics are more than interest or enjoyment… these things are their identity. The things that they love in a way that they could never love people… give them meaning.

The left is a creature of trends, it pops up in trendy places as the alternative and it is always changing and spawning alternatives to itself. It is always trying to be edgy as it can before it settles down to the pudgy displays of choked down anger of the man who does not quite dare to yell at a waiter on display nightly on MSNBC.

There is a lot of anger on MSNBC, but it is mostly misdirected anger. It is the anger of men who want to yell at their wives and sons but instead gibber at viewers in empty oyster bars that are as fake as their economics. It is the petty anger of men who have put so much of themselves into their hobbies because their shallow egotism permits them no more human a connection and tolerates not even the slightest slights against the objects of their impeccable tastes. It is the anger of an old elite that has become foolish and deranged and does not really know why it is angry anymore… except perhaps because it is dying.

Liberalism in those northeastern circles used to be a matter of good taste. There is nothing good about it anymore. It has become a suicide pact for angry lonely men who wait in imaginary oyster bars for a waiter who will never come, for an Age of Aquarius that will never be born and a transcendence of government that will never arrive no matter how they twist their hands, tug at their red napkins and lean forward.

Liberalism has become sick with its own disease. It is as dogma-ridden as any Red drinking sour beer in 1920s Chicago. It has nothing to offer to anyone except the ideological denunciation of thought crimes and the attendant superiority of being on the right side of the guillotine. And it has the misplaced self-righteousness of those who are busy pretending that they are angry about what is being done to other people, rather than their own egotistical anger with which they confront their sense of futility.

Liberalism, like all trends, seeks novelty, it burns brightest among the young, it plots to escape from history through the engine of progress only to discover that the mortality that is the greatest fear of the intellectual mayfly outlives the schemes of men.

The left personifies vanity. Its activists and advocates envision an escape from time only to drown it. Anger is their engine of change, but their anger makes only a little light and a little heat before it burns out leaving them alone in a cold dark oyster bar with history behind them, leaning forward into oblivion.

Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, a staunch supporter of Israel, announced Wednesday she will not for a fifth term in Congress next year.

Like Alaska’s former Gov, Sarah Palin in 2008, Bachmann was a darling of the Tea Party. After she launched a campaign for the GOP presidential nomination last year, she quickly became a frequent target for media mockery for several statements that were full of historical and factual errors.

Bachmann, who is not Jewish but volunteered on a kibbutz in 1974, delivered speeches as a fundamentalist Christian who has said she “grew up with a love for Israel.” She has asserted that Israel and the United States “share the same exceptional mission – to be a light unto the nations. I was raised in a home full of love for Israel. We learned that our Christian faith is rooted in Judaism.”

She was one of the founders of the Tea Party movement but believed the support from a vocal minority was broader based than it was. After she topped initial polls and then fell to the bottom of the pack in the crowded contest for the nomination, she dropped out of the running.

The campaign is history, but recent federal investigations have targeted her for misusing campaign funds.

She denies any wrongdoing and said the probe has nothing to do with her decision not to run again. In an eight-minute video explaining her decision. Bachmann tried to persuade supporters, if not herself, that she was sure she would win if she were to run again, although Jim Graves, who almost defeated her last year.